The 6'11", 275lb center Kelvin Cato was signed today just after the New York Knicks announced the waiving of Elton Brown, Million Clark, Nikoloz Tskitishvili, and Paul Miller.
Cato has been known to be an effective shot blocker over the years. He spent last season on the Pistons and two previous season with the Magic.
It is assumed that this pickup is insurance in case Jerome James never recovers from his planar fasciitis. Starting center Eddy Curry, although effective at time offensively, has shown very little this preseason in terms of rebounding and shot blocking.
The roster now stands at the maximum of 15.
Wednesday, October 25, 2006
Monday, October 16, 2006
Knicks forward Jared Jeffries out with Broken Wrist
The New York Knicks' newly acquired starting small forward probably won't suit up for the Knicks season opener on November 1st against the Memphis Grizzlies. Jared Jeffries injured his wrist during a dismemberment of the pathetic New Jersey Nets in a preseason game just a few days ago. Jeffries is expected to be the defensive glue for the team this year and my only guess is this means increased minutes (possibly starting minutes) for swingman Quentin Richardson, who has been rumored to have had a great training camp earlier this month. Rookie small forward Renaldo Balkmen, depending on how he fairs during the remainder of the preseason, could also see some of Jeffries' minutes at the three or four spot this season. Jalen Rose does not seem thus far to be in Isiah's master plan, particularly since Isiah intends to go young this year.
Knicks guard Steve Francis is also injured, though his injury appears to be less serious.
The Knicks play on Tuesday at home against the Boston Celtics and again against the Celtics on Saturday in Boston.
Knicks guard Steve Francis is also injured, though his injury appears to be less serious.
The Knicks play on Tuesday at home against the Boston Celtics and again against the Celtics on Saturday in Boston.
Saturday, October 14, 2006
knicks win preseason game against Nets, 111-97
Watched it on MSG TV last night. Mind you this is admittedly becoming a blog primarily about the Knicks, its becoming clear. I don't mind this however, if you don't mind either.
Well they won by about 20 points last night, even though they were without a set rotation. It seems like everybody on the team got 15-21 minutes last night, which leads me to the first issue: determining a lineup. This is going to be tough for Isiah to figure out, because, you could argue that at least 10 guys on this squad deserve solid minutes, and if he divides all minutes evenly, that means guys like Marbury and Francis are going to get 20-25 minutes a game which would be career lows for each former all-star. I have no solution to this problem. The second unit last night is truly an energizer team. Its like all 5 collectively could be called the microwaves plural, while vinnie johnson of Isiah's Pistons was singularly "the microwave." With James out (the one guy who has not earned deserved minutes since coming to the New York Knicks) look at this 5 coming off the bench
Nate Robinson - A dynamo, learning to distribute the ball in addition to his natural abilities.
Jamal Crawford - Didn't fill up the stat sheet last but you KNOW he can play from the second half of last year. I'm worried that the success of Crawford and Francis is mutually exclusive.
David Lee - Makes things happen on both ends of the floor, an intangibles guy, feisty competitor. won't back down from Nowitzsky or any one else.
Quentin Richardson - Already showing signs of redemption, rumored to have had the best training camp of all the knicks. Shot seems to be falling except the three ball (so far).
Renaldo Balkman - Another intangibles guy. Lee, Balkman and Jeffries are going to help win ball games. Scored 11p and pulled 7r in just 15 minutes. Lee plus Balkman equals a great combination and they showed signs of cohesiveness and compatibility.
As for Mardy Collins, he had a very nice block during the game and also a great ally-oop to Clark, a small 2 guard that should make someone's roster during the regular season.
Paul Miller didn't find his rhythm in very limited minutes, but I know from seeing the summer team that he can play pick and roll with Stephon (remember Steph and Doleac's brief interaction?) if he is kept on the Knicks past preseason. With Jerome James indefinitely questionable, I'd say either Miller or Elton Brown have the best chance of taking that 15th and last roster spot for a guaranteed contract. Unfortunately I doubt Tskitishvili is a player in Isiah's mold.
This Knicks team, which is trying to emulate certain aspects of various offesnive and defensive systems encountered by Isiah over time, coasted to 111 points without relying very much on its starters. This is an athletic team, a team that will turn the ball over but can and will force turnovers and cause fast breaks and layups. Every player on the Knicks scored last night.
Fourty wins seems very possible. Worst case, 30 wins and Isiah gets fired mid-season.
Well they won by about 20 points last night, even though they were without a set rotation. It seems like everybody on the team got 15-21 minutes last night, which leads me to the first issue: determining a lineup. This is going to be tough for Isiah to figure out, because, you could argue that at least 10 guys on this squad deserve solid minutes, and if he divides all minutes evenly, that means guys like Marbury and Francis are going to get 20-25 minutes a game which would be career lows for each former all-star. I have no solution to this problem. The second unit last night is truly an energizer team. Its like all 5 collectively could be called the microwaves plural, while vinnie johnson of Isiah's Pistons was singularly "the microwave." With James out (the one guy who has not earned deserved minutes since coming to the New York Knicks) look at this 5 coming off the bench
Nate Robinson - A dynamo, learning to distribute the ball in addition to his natural abilities.
Jamal Crawford - Didn't fill up the stat sheet last but you KNOW he can play from the second half of last year. I'm worried that the success of Crawford and Francis is mutually exclusive.
David Lee - Makes things happen on both ends of the floor, an intangibles guy, feisty competitor. won't back down from Nowitzsky or any one else.
Quentin Richardson - Already showing signs of redemption, rumored to have had the best training camp of all the knicks. Shot seems to be falling except the three ball (so far).
Renaldo Balkman - Another intangibles guy. Lee, Balkman and Jeffries are going to help win ball games. Scored 11p and pulled 7r in just 15 minutes. Lee plus Balkman equals a great combination and they showed signs of cohesiveness and compatibility.
As for Mardy Collins, he had a very nice block during the game and also a great ally-oop to Clark, a small 2 guard that should make someone's roster during the regular season.
Paul Miller didn't find his rhythm in very limited minutes, but I know from seeing the summer team that he can play pick and roll with Stephon (remember Steph and Doleac's brief interaction?) if he is kept on the Knicks past preseason. With Jerome James indefinitely questionable, I'd say either Miller or Elton Brown have the best chance of taking that 15th and last roster spot for a guaranteed contract. Unfortunately I doubt Tskitishvili is a player in Isiah's mold.
This Knicks team, which is trying to emulate certain aspects of various offesnive and defensive systems encountered by Isiah over time, coasted to 111 points without relying very much on its starters. This is an athletic team, a team that will turn the ball over but can and will force turnovers and cause fast breaks and layups. Every player on the Knicks scored last night.
Fourty wins seems very possible. Worst case, 30 wins and Isiah gets fired mid-season.
Tuesday, October 03, 2006
Linux brought my laptop back from the grave
Years ago in school I became intrigued with linux during an operating systems class I took during undergrad. Red hat was the distribution of choice back then, in fact that was the only distribution I knew of at that time. The desktop was Gnome, and there was this slow browser linux used called Firefox by Mozilla. We'd go into those computer labs, open up a terminal, login, type some commands to our virtual machines and that was it. Whatever I typed in I didn't learn much about. But my professors and friends were confident that this was a superior operating system and that it was more powerful, more robust, more secure, etc. I took their word for it and continued to use windows.
Over the years I had the urge to get back into linux to learn for myself this time and so I started looking for a distro to try. Red hat was no longer the most popular Linux OS. Apparently they went corporate and left their loyal fans instead with a community distro called Fedora Core, which I downloaded but have yet to install. I'm sure its nice.
Now there are all these live CDs where you can run the distro without even having to install it onto your hard drive. I think one of the first I tried was Ubuntu, which was impressive because so little of the hardware went undetected, I didn't really have to configure too much. Then I went .iso-crazy, I also tried Mandriva, Damn Small Linux (to see where a 80MB OS got me), Knoppix, Kanotix, I even installed SuSE but that didn't go as well as Knoppix or Kanotix.
I'm pretty sure I like KDE over GNOME but both are really fine replacements over Windows. There is definitely a learning curve to the linux experience though, and there are still times when I don't know what these people are talking about on these forums, but I usually end up getting it in the end. The forums are an awesome feature incidentally, both Ubuntu and PCLinuxOS have tremendous resources in their forums. Overall I'm sure it is easier to learn to use Linux now than when everything was through a terminal. Now there is a GUI for every task, everything is already detected, so I really expect Linux to have a bright future in the computer world.
My experiment let me to dual booting for a while with Ubuntu Breezy Badger and a bootleg copy of Windows XP on my home PC which is very modestly a AMD Duron 1GHz with 650MB of ram and a 20GB hard drive and a 52X cd-r drive. Not much but enough to do basic computer stuff, and that's all I really needed. I began to use Windows less and less, preferring Unbuntu for its look and feel. Then it got ugly fast. I wanted more space for Linux and less for Windows so I used the unbuntu partitioner that comes with the installation disk. You know what, there was an error during the re-partition. I lost my windows partition and all the unbacked data on it. This saddened me a bit, but not as much as you'd think. Computer catastrophes have happened to me so many times with PC's that I've come to adopt an easy-come easy-go attitude about computer files and mp3's. I try not to think of personal stuff like photos and such, whats gone is gone :(
I used to have a laptop. It died in 2004. My dell inspiron 8100 was a costly machine when I bought it back in 2001, so when it died about three years later, suffice to say I was a bit disappointed. I got dell on the horn and after walking me through a few test they declared my hard drive had fried. They wanted around $400 for a new one -I'm sure they figure since the computer has been out for 3 years, they can ask any price they'd like for the replacement because it is proprietary and I've got no choice to accept their terms. I said no and gave up on the machine. I didn't throw it out though, it just sat there at the bottom of my closet for over two years until my brother asked me for the laptop case to use with his new macbook. But wait, now that I have all these LiveCD isos burned, perhaps I can resuscitate my laptop and just run the disk from ram! It worked. It got even better when I tried to install on the hard drive, it seems dell just wanted another $400 off me because linux is up and running on my laptop without any major problems so far. I doubt if I even have any hard drive problem.
I now run PCLinuxOS on both my laptop and my desktop. Its a great OS, maybe it could be a little faster, but I really think this has got to be one of the most user friendly linux distros out there. My favorite so far. Perhaps in a few months I'll be ready for something like Slackware or Gentoo but for now PCLinuxOS is the way to go. Besides, with Ubuntu, I was using Automatix to install all the extras that Ubuntu leaves out, and I'm not sure how much I trust Automatix. It seems like a great script but you never know. PCLinuxOS comes pre-configured to play mp3's and other codecs, it's really ready to go right off the bat, even more than Ubuntu. Perhaps on the dvd and win32 codecs have to be added. That's not much.
Anyway, cheers to linux for all their flavors and distros (it's a slight addiction to keep trying more of them) and cheers to linux for saving of my old dell laptop. I'll be damned if I'm going fork over any more money to Ol' Bill G. just so I can run Adaware, Spybot and Trend House Call Virus Scan every single day.
Over the years I had the urge to get back into linux to learn for myself this time and so I started looking for a distro to try. Red hat was no longer the most popular Linux OS. Apparently they went corporate and left their loyal fans instead with a community distro called Fedora Core, which I downloaded but have yet to install. I'm sure its nice.
Now there are all these live CDs where you can run the distro without even having to install it onto your hard drive. I think one of the first I tried was Ubuntu, which was impressive because so little of the hardware went undetected, I didn't really have to configure too much. Then I went .iso-crazy, I also tried Mandriva, Damn Small Linux (to see where a 80MB OS got me), Knoppix, Kanotix, I even installed SuSE but that didn't go as well as Knoppix or Kanotix.
I'm pretty sure I like KDE over GNOME but both are really fine replacements over Windows. There is definitely a learning curve to the linux experience though, and there are still times when I don't know what these people are talking about on these forums, but I usually end up getting it in the end. The forums are an awesome feature incidentally, both Ubuntu and PCLinuxOS have tremendous resources in their forums. Overall I'm sure it is easier to learn to use Linux now than when everything was through a terminal. Now there is a GUI for every task, everything is already detected, so I really expect Linux to have a bright future in the computer world.
My experiment let me to dual booting for a while with Ubuntu Breezy Badger and a bootleg copy of Windows XP on my home PC which is very modestly a AMD Duron 1GHz with 650MB of ram and a 20GB hard drive and a 52X cd-r drive. Not much but enough to do basic computer stuff, and that's all I really needed. I began to use Windows less and less, preferring Unbuntu for its look and feel. Then it got ugly fast. I wanted more space for Linux and less for Windows so I used the unbuntu partitioner that comes with the installation disk. You know what, there was an error during the re-partition. I lost my windows partition and all the unbacked data on it. This saddened me a bit, but not as much as you'd think. Computer catastrophes have happened to me so many times with PC's that I've come to adopt an easy-come easy-go attitude about computer files and mp3's. I try not to think of personal stuff like photos and such, whats gone is gone :(
I used to have a laptop. It died in 2004. My dell inspiron 8100 was a costly machine when I bought it back in 2001, so when it died about three years later, suffice to say I was a bit disappointed. I got dell on the horn and after walking me through a few test they declared my hard drive had fried. They wanted around $400 for a new one -I'm sure they figure since the computer has been out for 3 years, they can ask any price they'd like for the replacement because it is proprietary and I've got no choice to accept their terms. I said no and gave up on the machine. I didn't throw it out though, it just sat there at the bottom of my closet for over two years until my brother asked me for the laptop case to use with his new macbook. But wait, now that I have all these LiveCD isos burned, perhaps I can resuscitate my laptop and just run the disk from ram! It worked. It got even better when I tried to install on the hard drive, it seems dell just wanted another $400 off me because linux is up and running on my laptop without any major problems so far. I doubt if I even have any hard drive problem.
I now run PCLinuxOS on both my laptop and my desktop. Its a great OS, maybe it could be a little faster, but I really think this has got to be one of the most user friendly linux distros out there. My favorite so far. Perhaps in a few months I'll be ready for something like Slackware or Gentoo but for now PCLinuxOS is the way to go. Besides, with Ubuntu, I was using Automatix to install all the extras that Ubuntu leaves out, and I'm not sure how much I trust Automatix. It seems like a great script but you never know. PCLinuxOS comes pre-configured to play mp3's and other codecs, it's really ready to go right off the bat, even more than Ubuntu. Perhaps on the dvd and win32 codecs have to be added. That's not much.
Anyway, cheers to linux for all their flavors and distros (it's a slight addiction to keep trying more of them) and cheers to linux for saving of my old dell laptop. I'll be damned if I'm going fork over any more money to Ol' Bill G. just so I can run Adaware, Spybot and Trend House Call Virus Scan every single day.
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